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Overview
Stern writes of addictions and passionate attachments, of the body and bodily pleasure, of autobiography and cultural history. Smoking is Stern's seductive pretext, her way of entering unknown and mysterious regions. The Smoking Book begins with intimate and vivid accounts of growing up on a tobacco farm in colonial Rhodesia, reminiscences that permeate subsequent excursions into precolonial tobacco production and postcolonial life in Zimbabwe, as well as dramatic vignettes set in Australia, the United States, Scotland, Italy, Japan, and South America. Stern has written a book, at once intensely personal and kaleidoscopically international, that weaves the intimate act of a solitary person smoking a cigarette into a broad cultural picture of desire, exchange, fulfillment, and the acts that bind people together, either in lasting ways or through ephemeral encounters.
The Smoking Book is for anyone who has ever smoked or loved a smoker (against their better judgment); it is for those who have never smoked or for those who mourn the loss of cigarettes as they would grieve for a lost friend. But mostly, The Smoking Book is for all those who are smoldering still.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226773308 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/1999 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Smoking Book
By Lesley Stern
University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2003
University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-226-77330-2
Chapter One
BURIAL
In the dead of night he is wakened by a strange sound, an animal-like
scratching and scuffling just outside the bedroom door. Some wild creature
sharpening its claws, shredding the carpet-though the muffled sound of
heavy breathing is not like an animal. It is utterly and horribly human.
He reaches out for her, but his arm moves in the dark through a vast and
empty space. She isn't there. He is alone in the bed and there is
something or someone strange in the house. In an instant he is rigid,
deafened by the sound of his own heart. Eventually, after a long time, the
house is quiet again, just the distant chugging of the fridge, the dog
gently groaning in its sleep.
He is reassured by the sleeping dog, realizes he must have dreamed the
alien sounds, dreamed into being fears long dormant. These fears,
acquiring life, had turned on him like vengeful demons: unnerving, but not
as bad as an intruder in the house. Better they assault just him, in his
dreams, than his children. He thinks of the children sleeping, feels a
sudden pain that softens into tenderness and slowly passes. Then,
remembering that the children are children no longer,have not lived at
home for years, he stretches, breathes deeply, and folds into sleep again.
He drifts in and out, dozing for a while, enjoying the sensation of
relief, a sense of reprieve after a false alarm, a close shave that brings
you to the edge-even if only momentarily-of a precipice.
Suddenly a sharp and ugly sensation yanks him into wakefulness. He leaps
up, finds himself crouching on the bed, ready to spring, go for the
jugular. A sliver of light moves swiftly across the crack under the door.
Silence. No gentle groans or somnolent growls, even the dog is silent. Or
silenced. He anticipates a terrible almost-human howling, envisages Max
Cady in Cape Fear prowling the house, passing through the walls like the
holy ghost, invisible. He can feel the presence of a figure on the other
side of the bedroom door, someone holding their breath, listening to the
silence. His own eyes grow accustomed to the dark, although he cannot tell
whether he is now seeing or feeling in the dark. The door handle moves,
imperceptibly, hardly at all. No, not at all, it hasn't moved, he tells
himself. But even as he tells himself this, he knows there is a man on the
other side of the door, holding the door handle in one hand-turning it
calmly, implacably, by minute degrees-while in the other he grips a knife
smeared with canine blood. "He's coming for me, to slit my throat. And no
one will know." In a flash he sees himself: pathetic, like some
beleaguered beast, baring its throat to the butcher. Cautiously he slinks
back under the covers. He will pretend to be asleep, but he is alert-he
can see through the loose weave of the blanket-and will trap the intruder.
The door edges open and in the crack light flickers. A figure moves into
the room, a dark silhouette.
The figure turns into the light and he sees: it is her. Only her, a figure
as familiar as his own body. The tension begins to dissipate, but slowly,
uneasily. It is as though knots have formed through his being from tip to
toe. He holds his breath and watches as she moves across the room, easing
the wardrobe door open, carefully trying to avoid the habitual squeak. I
must oil the hinges, he thinks. With her back to the bed, shielding the
flashlight beam, she scrambles among old clothes piled at the back of the
wardrobe; she burrows into the bottom of voluminous coat pockets, turns
shirts inside out, baggy jeans upside down. He knows that she will already
have gone through the house searching in jars, behind books in the
bookcase, at the back of untidy drawers filled with junk. It happens once
a year or so: the evil spirit comes upon her in the night, and she invades
her own house, excavating the accretions of daily living, wanting
desperately to find a remnant of the past, a sign of life. "Not much to
ask," she'd say if pushed, "a little thing."
That thing which is so simply and satisfyingly itself: a cigarette.
He pretends to be asleep, to not bear witness. And after a while he does
drift off, but it is into a troubled dreaming he has fallen, as though her
edginess has pervaded his sleep. When he wakes again several hours later,
she is still not there. He gets out of bed and goes to draw the curtain to
shut out the moonlight pouring into the room. But as he gets groggily out
of bed, he realizes that earlier it was pitch-dark-there is no moon
tonight. At the window he looks down and sees that the porch light is on,
a floodlight illuminating a scene of ritual. She is on her knees under the
big flowering eucalyptus, which drips redly in the harsh light, and she is
digging. Around her are strewn hyacinths that have been ripped out of the
earth. Her pale pink candlewick dressing gown is smeared with dirt and her
hands, which she now lifts up in front of her face, are muddy.
What is she doing? Praying? Burying a body? Stashing some incriminating
evidence in a safe place-her own front yard?
She is holding something in her hands, cradling some object, some precious
mysterious thing. Which she now lays on the ground, unwraps the cloth that
is wound around it, and tenderly wipes off the dirt with the hem of her
dressing gown. Then it dawns on him: it is not a burial ceremony that has
taken place in this clandestine theater, but a disinterment, a grave
robbery.
She looks at the object that fits so snugly in the palm of her hand. The
cellophane wrapping remains intact, the contents will still be pristine,
preserved all this time in their garden grave. Can she bring herself to do
it, will she tear the wrapping?
She remembers, all those years ago going out, armed with a shovel, into
the garden and digging a grave. A small grave, but deep. And in it she had
buried a tiny coffin. Her last pack of cigarettes. In Smoke Stoppers they
had told her: "Imagine the pack of cigarettes as a coffin, and all the
cigarettes you've smoked as corpses." As a young teenager she'd had a
boyfriend who'd said, "Kissing a smoker is like putting your tongue in a
wet ashtray filled with cigarette stubs and ash. Or even worse," he'd
said, warming to the horror, "it's like putting your tongue into a
cremation urn-full of the ashes of a dead person." But these were not the
injunctions and warnings that had provoked her private and elaborate rite;
rather, she had done this in order to enact a ceremonial separation, to
anchor the mourning, to stake the grieving process. Now she sees that this
was a gesture bound to fail; rather than letting go, she had perfidiously
conceived of this little coffin as a safety deposit box, a last resort, a
final refuge. Yet how could it ever represent finality or be exhaustively
symbolic? As she looks at this small pack, at once wondrous and pathetic,
as she ponders the few cigarettes contained within it, the very fewness of
them calls up the thousands, millions of cigarettes smoked in her
lifetime. Is it the activity of smoking that is mourned, she now wonders,
or the individual being of those cigarettes? She remembers a friend saying
to her (or perhaps she had read it, the book on her pillow, the words
entering consciousness as she fell asleep): "Smoking is like movie
watching: often you can't put your finger on what it is that is so
pleasurable about the images unfolding before your eyes, wrapping around
you in the dark." Like cigarettes it is not the special taste or aroma,
color or movement, narrative even, that produces pleasure, but that slight
giddiness that springs from the not quite the same in which we recognize
the same tobacco.
* * *
FIRE ESCAPE
Why is it better to last than to burn?-Roland Barthes, A Lover's
Discourse
I enact fanaticism. Extrapolating every obsessive nuance from an arcane
repertoire of bodybuilding gestures. Instead of smoking. In order to
resist the memory, I meditate and stretch and walk a tightrope, never
looking down, only straight ahead-into an old-age future full of graceful
backbends and carrot juice insouciance. Still, I retain a skepticism about
the "healthy body," about this mythically modernist corpus as generative
of a "healthy mind." How can anyone with their wits about them possibly
believe in a healthy mind? Yet a rampantly pernicious faith attaches to
this ontological impossibility.
A healthy mind is like a body of writing in which all fury has risen to
the surface and there been scrupulously skimmed away by the janitors of
moderation. They who lurk with their nets and weights and balances, wads
of blotting paper and fire extinguishers.
Robinson Crusoe recounts the advice given to him by his father. The father
exhorts his son to persevere, not to deviate from the "middle station of
life." It is a chillingly detailed passage of writing. The details are
passed on, not merely down the line of inheritance, down the line of least
resistance (on the contrary, as the younger son, Crusoe's inheritance is
ambiguous), but into, and through, the body of this supremely narrative
text. The paternal advice constitutes a speech that fathers fortune and
inscribes a whole tradition of Anglo-Saxon morality. It is a speech about
retention and the building of fire escapes. On "his" island Crusoe
constructs a building with rooms to hold all his worldly goods, going to
elaborate lengths to safeguard them against the weather, theft, and fire,
while he himself continues to sleep in a cave. The exercise of self-denial
is evident. But the contortions of virtue are more intricate than one
might imagine. Through a characteristically Puritan mode of elision, the
body is conflated with worldly goods. Through this procedure, the body is
in fact objectified, distanced. It can only be kept safe if detached. It
is put in a safe place-that is, not the sleeping place, not the bedroom.
By this maneuver, the mind is protected from clutter-mind and body,
separated out, are actually coerced into a negatively metaphrastic
liaison. We can read Robinson Crusoe as a dual-purpose manual, to do with
abstinence and building-bodybuilding, empire building, character building,
and home building. It is the Anglo-Saxon mode of construction-you build
the fire escape first.
It galls me to be renouncing nicotine now as the new moralism gathers and
rises and suffocates. Every time I drive over the Horseshoe Bridge and see
that video image of Yul Brynner, I want to throw up. There he is projected
against the sky, larger than life, flanked by up-to-date statistics
detailing the number of deaths in this state caused by smoking. Stop
smoking, smell better, and live longer, they say. Be prepared! If you've
got a clean mind in a healthy body, then come Judgment Day you'll make
your fortune. You can fight your way to the front of the fire escape queue
with a clean conscience. Don't squander matches, shore up against the
future, invest in safety deposits. In the face of all this, the adolescent
romance of smoking returns, seductively: an edge of seediness, tackiness,
dingy saloons, the glamour of delinquency. To smoke is to break the rules,
to affront, to refuse the compact of civility.
If there is a strain of romance that circulates through the sordid and the
flamboyantly excessive, so too there is a romance of renunciation. Take
Casablanca. Casablanca makes you feel good for simultaneously giving up
and holding on. It's the Puritan romance of anal retention. Now, Voyager
is also about renunciation, I suppose, but at least it flirts with
perversity, and it's profoundly acute in charting the ruinous relation
between smoking and desire. Think, though, of those other movies, fraught
with urgency, those that ask-and it's not an idle question-Why is it
better to last than to burn? Think of A Bout de Souffle, Written on the
Wind and The Bad and the Beautiful. (Gone with the Wind, though it is less
about renunciation and all about romance, is nevertheless finally
dedicated to a vision of rebuilding, of endurance. A pragmatic lesson
arises out of the conflagration: in order to preserve the white colonial
dream, build a fire escape first.) Think of Emmylou Harris-in the face of
utter loss, of the irretrievable, she sings: "And the prairie was on
fire." Here, it isn't even a question of which is better, but neither is
there any question of escape, of calculated survival. He's burning in the
desert and she's alive. So when she sings, "I don't want to hear a sad
story, full of heartbreak and desire," she means it, but nevertheless she
must tell the story, register-in her voice-this incendiary sadism, this
being-eaten-aliveness.
Against the tradition of Robinson Crusoe and Casablanca, there's a lineage
undoubtedly romantic in its own way but less retentive-Brunhild, The
Doors, Peggy Lee ... When Peggy Lee sings "Is that all there is?" so
much depends on "all." Or nothing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Smoking Book
by Lesley Stern
Copyright © 2003 by University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsSmoke Circles
Burnout
Suspended Forever
A Fishy Smell
Not Wanting
Burial
Like a Precious Gem
Yakandanda
The Body Has a Mind of Its Own
White Man
Translation (a gift of opium)
No Substitute
Seasickness
Screaming
To Bubble and Rumble (like an elephant)
Memory Missiles
A Smoky Edifice (implosion)
Babies or Booze (metonymy)
Bombs or Burns (metaphor)
Traced by (a slight sense of) Bitterness
Instead of a Lobotomy (a cigarette)
To Remember (to find yourself in fragments)
To Forget
Chaos
Smoko
Black Hole Spinning (the physics of writing)
Healthy
Strange Attractors
A Lycanthropic Age (the writing cure)
A Boil About to Burst (the talking cure)
Voicing
Mouthing
Appetite
Lions Don't Smoke
Poison
Fog Drinking
Kettle Logic (the art of separation)
I Done a Lotta Bad Things
The Smoking Room
Kindness (or, the werewolf comes home)
Those Places in the Body That Have No Language Either
Anticipation (a crevice opening up)
Habit
Panic
A Sleeping Problem
Open Arms
Fire Escape
Lighting Up
Unspooling
Demons
Possessed
Smoking Landscape
Life-Giving Mist
In Transit
Notes
Glossary
What People are Saying About This
The Smoking Book is a pastiche, a brainy critique of addiction-recovery memoirs and actual memoir, as well as fictional narratives about the body and ontological philosophy.
—Rachel Mattson, Voice Literary Supplement